Borders are back nationalism is back - but not here

Three years ago, at the start of the Ukraine war, I reflected on how it might change political culture

Photo by Maksym Pozniak-Haraburda on Unsplash

The return of war in Europe, tanks trenches and all, has been a profound shock to the elites of Europe who believed we’d left such analogue conflicts behind. This is the age of the safe space, after all. Surely, we’re beyond all that toxic masculinity now? It’s only knuckle-dragging nationalists who still talk of fighting for their countries - or so we thought.

Well, go tell the folk in Kyiv’s bomb shelters. Sovereignty is not an abstract concept any more but a matter of life and death. The Ukraine war looks like the end of the “long” 20th Century, and the start of something, well, rather more traditional: militant nationalism.

The European Union project was premised on globalisation – the idea that borders were irrelevant and essentially xenophobic. This has been the default position of Europe’s political and media elites for the last 30 years, though many ordinary voters were never entirely happy about losing national self-determination to an unelected bureaucracy in Brussels.

Borders reasserted themselves somewhat during Covid. Now, following the Russian invasion, borders really are back, fighting nationalism is back. When people face threats to their security they look to their national government for protection.